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Guidance by Word, Card, and StarSun, 28 Jan 2018 03:45:53 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngDruid Journalhttps://druidjournal.net
The Face of Justicehttps://druidjournal.net/2016/10/27/the-face-of-justice/
https://druidjournal.net/2016/10/27/the-face-of-justice/#commentsThu, 27 Oct 2016 19:47:21 +0000http://druidjournal.net/?p=97279The twitch of the tips of the lips at rest
The hooded eyes that are just awakening, or just sleeping –
Not wide with surprise, or closed in sleep —
Open to let just enough light in, each photon carrying the universe within it —
The rest of the face utterly relaxed, at rest.
The mouth is closed, giving nothing but its tiny smile, accepting nothing.
The nose admits the breath without fuss.
The ears are open, but do not hear everything.
The skin is smooth and untroubled, like the surface of clear still water.
Justice reflected in the face as the images of birds flying over a lake.
Justice does not fall like a hammer
Or rush down from the mountains in a flood.
Justice is silent, quiet, still, almost
Utterly without motion, almost at rest
Except for the eyes that see just enough
And the lips, whose tiny smile
Bends the arc of history just so.

Many thanks to Alison and Kate for hosting the Soul Writing workshop which gave rise to this poem last night.

]]>https://druidjournal.net/2016/10/27/the-face-of-justice/feed/4fireflyjellyphoto-jan-17-3-15-54-pmThings Fall Apart: Why We Think Everything’s Getting Worsehttps://druidjournal.net/2015/04/02/things-fall-apart-why-we-think-everythings-getting-worse/
https://druidjournal.net/2015/04/02/things-fall-apart-why-we-think-everythings-getting-worse/#commentsThu, 02 Apr 2015 17:54:40 +0000http://druidjournal.net/?p=93155Most Americans, year after year, continue to think that the country is on the wrong track. The older you are (i.e, the more experienced you are, and the more of history you’ve seen), the more likely you are to think everything is falling apart. And it’s not just in America: worldwide, people tend to think things are getting worse. And it’s undeniable that the world is facing horrible problems: climate change, pollution, terrorism, income inequality, racism, sexism, etc., etc., etc.

Maybe you’ve noticed the same thing in your own life. I don’t mean to be depressing here… but how many times have you failed to change a habit, or break an addiction? How many of your jobs have fallen through? How many times have you had to move away from your home? How many pets have you lost? How many of your friendships and relationships have failed, or faded away in distance or time? How many people you’ve loved are gone forever?

Almost all of us have tragic answers to those questions. The things we love in our lives always end; the patterns we love endlessly unravel.

Detail from “Consternation”, by Scott Grady, 1977. Thanks to Ali for this image.

In nature, things unravel, too. But there, something else is always raveling up to take its place. Trees die, but their tall standing snags — monuments to themselves — are colonized by armies of insects, fungi, and other critters, which in turn become feasts for woodpeckers and other animals. And when the snags finally fall, they become nurse logs for the next generation of trees, nourishing a richer, more diverse forest.

A tree’s death is a catastrophe, but it’s also what Tolkien called a eucatastrophe: a sort of deus ex machina, except that instead of a god swooping in from on high at the last minute to save everything, it’s a sudden unexpected change in fortune that’s consistent with the established framework of the milieu. It’s a miraculous redemption that arises inevitably from the world itself.

Oftentimes, a eucatastrophe is the result of the efforts of many, many individuals (humans, bugs, plants… doesn’t matter), each working for their own benefit or the benefit of their local community. Individually, each effort is barely noticeable, but when they’re added up, profound changes take place. Since these small efforts are self-directed, it can be extremely difficult to see what the final aggregate result will be, and whether it will, in the end, be good or bad.

Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere. – Elrond, in the Fellowship of the Ring

So perhaps things look like they’re unraveling simply because we don’t have the complete picture. We as a species are young, and our vision is limited. We sometimes glimpse things that might happen, but for the most part, we only see the present and the past. It’s no wonder that most of what we see seems to be dying or dead.

The core of the problem, really, is that we can so rarely see patterns before they emerge. And so the world seems to be falling into disorder, and our lives seem to be full of endings, with precious few new beginnings.

It is an illusion, though. A new order is rising up, but we can’t see it. This is why eucatastrophes are surprising.

Detail from “Consternation”, by Scott Grady, 1977. Thanks to Ali for this image.

Oftentimes we can see the re-raveling only in hindsight. Human history is littered with dire disasters and intractable problems: the ‘population bomb’, the end of oil, war, the nuclear holocaust, monarchy, illiteracy, slavery… But it’s an undeniable fact that most of these problems have gotten better over the last few hundred years. Not solved — not by a long shot; even one person enslaved is a terrible tragedy. But better. Most problems, like human rights violations and non-renewable energy, have been improved through long years of thankless toil. Many others, like slavery in the US, cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Some, like the falling rates of crime and warfare worldwide, have just been slowly eroding away, though no one really knows why. And a few, like the hegemonic Soviet Union, have ended in a completely unexpected eucatastrophe.

This happens in one’s own life as well. I’ve left behind friends in six different cities, lost three jobs, lost a marriage… Many of these changes left me wondering whether everything I’d worked and struggled for was gone forever. But of course, I made friends in the seventh city, scored that fourth job, and found a true soul partner. After 40+ years of life I’m finally starting to glimpse the larger tapestry sometimes. There are still problems and tragedies I struggle with, but someday — sooner, perhaps, than I can see — they will pass, too.

Seeing the Raveling

How can we get better at seeing patterns before they’re fully formed?

First, practice.Look for the raveling. Too often we focus only on what is going wrong, or what we fear will go wrong. This is instinctive. As embodied beings, it’s natural to be wary, to watch for danger. But take time to look for what is going right, or what might go right, and focus on that as well. The old saying is to hope for the best and prepare for the worst; and both parts of that are important.

Also, study history. Look at how eucatastrophes happened. Most people were surprised when the Soviet Union collapsed, when monarchies ended, and so on — but the writing was on the wall for decades. What writing is on the wall now?

And finally, have some faith. One of the things I struggle with personally, as a Druid, is what Alison calls the ‘Problem of Justice’. Just as Christians wonder why God permits evil in the world, we who follow a nature-based spirituality wonder what is natural and what is unnatural, what is right and wrong, what is evil and what is good. When you see an oil spill or a huge parking lot and you feel a visceral revulsion or sorrow, your body is telling you that it is unnatural, wrong, evil — especially when compared with a forest or pristine river. But obviously humans are part of the natural world, and what we do is natural; so in a sense, an oil spill or parking lot is natural too. So why are we always tearing things down, causing mass extinctions, and fouling the waters? How can these things be “natural”, how can they be “good”?

And it’s not just humanity. When beavers flood a forest, felling and drowning dozens of trees, or when wolves disembowel an encroaching coyote and defecate around its body as a warning to the others, we have the same problem:

Many earth-centered spiritualities look to the relationships, patterns and laws of nature for insight into the ways we might live a just and ethical life — yet, within nature are myriad examples of suffering, destruction, violence, injustice, even cruelty and maliciousness… How should we respond to them? — Alison Leigh Lilly

The resolution of these paradoxes (both the Druid paradox and the Christian one) may, in part, lie in our limited human understanding. Maybe we just can’t yet see how the evils of the world will be woven into the larger pattern of beauty. In nature, always, there is a subtle, organic order at work. Problems turn out to be blessings; tragedies plant the seeds of triumphs. Even in truly awful situations — such as a forest fire — there is a hidden raveling. Underbrush is cleared out, soil is renewed, seeds are germinated, diversity is increased, and diseases are cleared away. Forests periodically burn as naturally as the cycle of the seasons. Maybe what we see today as injustice is part of a great invisible cycle.

It can be hard to have faith, to believe in rebirth, when all you can see is death. But something wonderful is being born, right now. Study, sit in silence, and wait, and you will see it.

]]>https://druidjournal.net/2015/04/02/things-fall-apart-why-we-think-everythings-getting-worse/feed/2fireflyjellyDetail from "Consternation", by Scott Grady, 1977. Thanks to Ali for this image.Detail from "Consternation", by Scott Grady, 1977. Thanks to Ali for this image.Meditation: Animist Consecrationhttps://druidjournal.net/2015/02/27/meditation-animist-consecration/
https://druidjournal.net/2015/02/27/meditation-animist-consecration/#respondFri, 27 Feb 2015 21:24:08 +0000http://druidjournal.net/?p=93202Last night my awesome wife Ali and I joined in a set of consecration ceremonies at our Unitarian Universalist church. Along with the Reverend’s UU blessing and our friend Chris’s Wiccan consecration, we demonstrated a Druid / Animist method of connecting with an object.

I say “connecting with” an object instead of “consecrating” because in our tradition, all things are sacred. We cannot imbue an object with holiness. It is already holy. What we can do is recognize the sacredness of the object, and enter into relationship with it (or deepen our existing relationship). We do this by sitting with the object, touching it, and listening for its voice in the Song of the World.

I wrote a meditation to guide this process, and it seemed to go well, so here it is in full:

Animist Consecration Meditation

Sit and relax. Take a deep breath… and release. As you breathe out, let all your tension melt away. Relax your shoulders, relax your neck, relax your eyes. Take another deep breath… and release. Imagine that a wave of warm golden light is slowly rising in your body, starting in your feet, rising up through your legs, up into your torso. The warm golden light fills your body, down your arms and into your fingers, up to the top of your head… Let your body sink, growing heavier. Your arms and legs have become heavy and settle comfortably.

Now turn your attention gently to the object in your hands. Feel its weight there. Imagine that, like your body, it is becoming heavier. Feeling its weight and heft pressing in your hands helps you relax further. … Feel its texture. Is it hard? Soft? Smooth? How does it respond when you apply gentle pressure? … Feel the temperature of the object in your hands. Perhaps it has responded to the warmth of your body, becoming warmer as you’ve been holding it.

Think about history of the object. Where did it come from? How did it come into this room? How did it come into your possession? Do you know who else has held this object, if anyone else ever has? Was it crafted by a person, or by a machine, or is it completely natural? How long ago was it made? Where did the materials of the object come from? From an animal? A plant? If so, what do you know about those living beings, and the lives they led? Did they live nearby, experiencing the same summers and winters and rains as ourselves? Or did they live far away, in a distant land, under different stars? Has it been under the sea? Did it come from the earth, crafted from stone or crystal, formed millions of years ago?

Imagine what it must have been like to experience the history of this object — from the time of its making down to the present day. Think about what it must be like to be the object, now, today, surrounded by us in this warm and sacred space, being held and warmed by your hands.

Feel the warmth of the object again. The object has responded to the heat in your hands. The heat in the object is nothing more nor less than vibration; its atoms and molecules have begun to vibrate along with the atoms and molecules of your hand. If your ears were sensitive enough, you would be able to hear the vibration of the object in the air. Hold it tightly and feel the warmth. If it were making an audible sound, what would it be? Would it be high-pitched, or low? Would it be a single constant tone, or a chord of notes? A monotone, or a tune? …

Hear that sound in your mind. Focus on it.

Now, in a moment, when you are ready and comfortable, respond to the song of the object, in whatever way feels right. Maybe you want to hum along with it, or provide a bass or counterpoint. Maybe what is called from you is a chant, or a whisper. Sit with your object, listen to it, and respond. Sing the song of the world with your object.

]]>https://druidjournal.net/2015/02/27/meditation-animist-consecration/feed/0fireflyjelly2015-02-25 20.23.00-1Powers of Darknesshttps://druidjournal.net/2014/10/27/powers-of-darkness/
https://druidjournal.net/2014/10/27/powers-of-darkness/#respondMon, 27 Oct 2014 18:54:39 +0000http://druidjournal.net/?p=84760In 1997 there were about two thousand children living in the homeless shelters of Miami, FL. (There are more than twice as many now at the time of this writing, 2014.) Lynda Edwards, a reporter for the Miami New Times, submitted an article in June of that year documenting the folk tales and beliefs of these children. The article has become something of a quiet sensation on the Internet; it’s long, but it’s powerful and extremely disturbing. I first read about it in 2006, from my friend Kate Gladstone, who guaranteed that I would never forget it.

She was right. I have to say it is still one of the most harrowing and hair-raising things I’ve ever read. It’s a strange combination of the creepiest sort of fantastic horror — the kind you love to hear around a campfire — alongside the reality of homelessness and abject poverty — more mundane maybe, but no less horrible.

It’s a long article, so don’t feel compelled to jump right over and read it immediately, but it is amazing, poignant, and harrowing, and should be read. The children have collectively created a mythology that is rich, colorful, and choked with fear and desperation. For someone such as myself, who believes in various overlapping mythological systems, it raises all sorts of difficult and vital issues. Are the children really tapping into spiritual truths? Are they actually being contacted by spirits, as they claim? If so, why is their vision so full of fear and doom, when the visions of so many other spiritual people have so much light and joy?

A Mythology of Fear

Edwards begins with a story told by an older child at the Salvation Army’s shelter on NW 38th street. Andre is telling an audience of younger children that angels eat neon light so that they can fly. They particularly love the neon lights of the NationsBank building; and they gather there at night to plan their battle strategies against the powers of darkness. The angels must fight because the world is at war; and it’s a war fought street by street, house by house, child by child. Andre tells the children that they have to learn how to fight, how to live — and they have to learn the secret stories.

God cannot protect them, because God has already been defeated. On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an attack by an army of demons. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell.

The angels are losing. The evidence of transcendent evil is everywhere for these children, in a world where drugs and gangs and violence and gunfire repeatedly tear their fragile lives apart. Even the angels themselves are essentially homeless, since Heaven has been lost to Satan.

Somewhere in the jungles beyond Miami is a safe, if temporary, refuge, a place guarded by giant crocodiles, where souls can go to rest for a while. But the dead can only enter it if a fresh green palm leaf is dropped on their graves.

The demons invading our world are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear. One demon is feared even by Satan. In Miami shelters, children know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). Her eyes are empty sockets that cry blood or black tears, and if you see her, with her robes blowing about without wind, and her red rosaries clicking, you know she has marked you for death. She enters the hearts of friends and family and turns them into deadly enemies. If you dare, smear a mirror with ocean water, and stare at it in the dark as you chant her name, and she will come. The stories say that she killed her own child, and has made a pact with the devil to kill all human children. The stories say even more horrible things, but I will not repeat them here.

The homeless children’s chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. “The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name,” says Andre, whose mother has been through three rehabilitation programs for crack addiction. “If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: ‘Hold on.'”

A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his eye, swollen huge as a ruby egg and laced with black stitches, nods his head in affirmation. “I’ve seen her,” he murmurs. A rustle of whispered Me toos ripples through the small circle of initiates.

Edwards points out that, as dark as this vision is, it helps the children, because it’s a way that they can understand why their lives are so horrible, and why it seems as though the adults in their lives — the ones who are supposed to be taking care of them — either don’t care, or are powerless to help. Even if its the wrong explanation, it’s better than no explanation. And because the children can act to help the angels, their lives — and deaths — are given meaning.

One child whose life has been touched by the Blue Angel is Maria:

She first appeared to Maria at the deserted Freedom Tower in downtown Miami, which Maria calls “the pink haunted house.” A fierce storm was pounding Miami that night. Other homeless people who had broken in milled about the building’s interior, illuminated only by lightning. Her father was drunk. Her mother tried to stop him from eating the family’s last food: a box of saltines. “He kept hitting her and the crazy people started laughing. When I try to help her, he hit me here” — Maria points to her forehead. “I tried to sleep so my head and stomach would stop hurting, but they kept hurting.” A blast of wind and rain shattered a window. “I was so scared. I pray out loud: Please, God, don’t punish me no more!”

An older boy curled up nearby on a scrap of towel tried to soothe her. “Hurricanes ain’t God,” he said gently. “It’s Blue Lady bringing rain for the flowers.” When Maria awoke late in the night, she saw the angel with pale blue skin, blue eyes, and dark hair standing by the broken window. Her arms dripped with pink, gold, and white flowers. “She smiled,” Maria says, her dark eyes wide with amazement. “My head was hurting, but she touched it and her hand was cool like ice. She say she’s my friend always. That’s why she learned me the hard song.” The song is complex and strange for such a young child; its theme is the mystery of destiny and will. When Maria heard a church choir sing it, she loved it, but the words were too complicated. “Then the Blue Lady sang it to me,” she recalls. “She said it’ll help me grow up good, not like daddy.”

Maria agreed to sing some of the song: “If you believe within your heart you’ll know/that no one can change the path that you must go./ Believe what you feel and you’ll know you’re right because/when love finally comes around, you can say it’s yours./ Believe you can change what you see!/ Believe you can act, not just feel!/You have a brain!/You have a heart!/You have the courage to last your life!/Please believe in yourself as I believe in you!”

“Even if my mom say we sleep in the bus station when we leave the shelter, Blue Lady will find us. She’s seen my face.”

Stories For Children

How do the children know these things? Some of the stories are obviously derived from urban legends found in other places. The basics of the Bloody Mary story are known to children throughout America and Europe, especially among girls, although her name is variously Mary Worth or Worthy, Mary Worthington, or Hell Mary, and she is not always viewed as evil. The Bloody Mary legend appears to have been merged with the La Llorona legend of Latin America, a woman crying for her children, whom she drowned. (If you want to be horrified a dozen times over, look at the Wikipediaarticles on these urban legends.) As for the Blue Lady, she may have derived from Yemana (or Yemaya or Imanja or Big Mama Wati), a compassionate blue-robed Santeria ocean goddess.

But none of this explains the children who have seen and spoken to these spirits, and whose lives have been touched — for good and for bad — by them. They do not explain Maria and her song. They do not explain the angels and dead relatives that come to the children and give them updates on how the War is going. They do not explain the child haunted nightly by the ghost of his father until he managed to place fresh leaves on his grave. They do not explain the gang that called on Bloody Mary to help them protect one of their members from justice… and how she incited them to kill him themselves.

These stories have real power — powers of meaning-making equal to that of many mature religions; powers of life and death, light and darkness. How, then, can they be so dark? So horrible, so hopeless?

Those of us who pray to God know full well that He has not abandoned us. Those of us who pray to pantheons have experienced firsthand the richness of the spirit world, the cycles of growth and retreat, and the supreme power of Light over Dark (if Dark is acknowledged to be anything other than an illusion!). How can the children be so clearly connected to the spirit world, and yet draw from it so much fear and horror?

The Fascination of Horror

Have you stood in front of a dark mirror and called out her name? Most of us have. Anyone who hears this story is bound to be horrified, but also intrigued and curious… Would it work? Would she really come? What would it be like? Am I brave enough to do it — and if I am, and she appears, am I brave enough to do anything other than scream?

The excitment and delight and thrill of a really good scare — this is nearly universal among us. But why? Lynda says:

Folklorists were so mystified by Bloody Mary, and the common element of using a mirror to conjure her, that they consulted medical literature for clues. Bill Ellis, a folklorist and professor of American studies at Penn State University, puzzled over a 1968 Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease article describing an experiment testing the theory that schizophrenics are prone to see hallucinations in reflected surfaces. The research showed that the control group of nonpsychotic people reported seeing vague, horrible faces in a mirror after staring at it for twenty minutes in a dim room. But that optical trick the brain plays was just a partial explanation for the children’s legend.

“Whenever you ask children where they first heard one of their myths, you get answers that are impossible clues: ‘A friend’s friend read it in a paper; a third cousin told me,'” says Ellis, an authority on children’s folklore, particularly that concerning the supernatural. As president of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, he’s become an expert on polygenesis — the appearance of a story in multiple places at the same time. “When a child says he got the story from the spirit world, as homeless children do, you’ve hit the ultimate non sequitur.”

Regardless of whether Bloody Mary is real, any attempt to contact her or summon her is at best an act of idiocy, at worst a particularly unpleasant way to commit suicide. What is it that pulls us to her? What is the source of the fascination?

Creeping Dread

In meditation, I’ve visited with many spirits, guides, and gods, including my anima, who had this to say.

First, yes, Bloody Mary is real, and so are a whole host of other evil spirits. But in fact they are not very powerful. In and of themselves, most of them can be banished by sunlight on daisies. What really gives them power over us is our own fear and ignorance. They cannot affect us unless our fear drives us down to a low enough “vibration” that they can reach us. Bloody Mary will not appear in the mirror unless you are already ridiculously frightened — the fear alone will give her the strength to take on a visible form. She really does feed on fear, in a very literal way; and lack of fear will render her powerless.

So what is the source of the fascination?

First, understand that we are immortal souls; we may be damaged or blocked for a while, but we cannot be destroyed. Second, remember that it is by facing our fears that we grow and mature. Therefore, what could be more natural than a fascination — an attraction — to danger and adventure? Danger is an invitation to growth; fascination with it is healthy.

But for these homeless children, who have fear and desperation as constant companions, and have few comforts in life, Bloody Mary is a power to be avoided at all costs.

I experienced the fascination of horror myself while I was researching this article. When I was younger, I would have dismissed the Bloody Mary legend as balderdash, but now I’m a little older and wiser and I know what spirits can do. I found myself intensely curious about this story, and read many different versions of it, and found lots of examples of people online who had seen her.

Clever me — I was doing this research in the middle of the night. I was not in a room with a mirror, but of course all the windows around me had been turned into mirrors by the darkness of night behind them. I slowly, inexorably, began to freak out. I was sure I felt a not-too-friendly presence in the room with me, and wondered if I had been summoning Bloody Mary — or something equally unpleasant — with my fascination and dread.

I fought hard to dispel the fear. I saw nothing. But for the first time in over twenty-five years, I had to go to sleep with the lights on.

]]>https://druidjournal.net/2014/10/27/powers-of-darkness/feed/0dark branchesfireflyjellyfluteofdawnZemanta Related Posts Thumbnaildark branchesThe Mind of a Rock: Musings on Orr’s ‘Wakeful World’https://druidjournal.net/2014/05/01/the-mind-of-a-rock-musings-on-orrs-wakeful-world/
https://druidjournal.net/2014/05/01/the-mind-of-a-rock-musings-on-orrs-wakeful-world/#commentsThu, 01 May 2014 19:20:23 +0000http://druidjournal.net/?p=49154For thousands of years, Western civilization has been living with a striking paradox. On the one hand, we are clearly physical beings living in a physical universe. And yet, we have these thoughts, feelings, dreams, and perceptions… They seem related to the physical universe, yet fundamentally different in character. We have an ‘inner’ life, which has its own colors and sounds and structure, operating under a whole different set of rules. In the physical world, I’m 3500 miles from where my body was born; but my mind instantly recalls the name of the state, county, and town where that happened, and gives the exact date and time. And yet, since I have no memory of the actual event, in a way my mind can never go there at all — it’s as though I can visit the post office box instantly, but never get to the house itself.

Mind and body seem so different that it’s almost as if they belong to separate worlds entirely. No doubt this is why it’s been so easy for so many people to believe in a ‘soul’, a mind that can be separated from the body and continue its life, in its inner world, long after the body has died — or even enter another body entirely. This despite the fact that the mind is obviously affected by physical events: it becomes sluggish and unfocused when the body is tired or sick, and it can lose memory or skills or even suffer a change of personality if the brain is injured or chemically affected.

Over time, two main camps have formed around this paradox. The first, as I’ve mentioned, believe that the soul or mind is separate from the physical body, and is fundamentally made of a different kind of stuff; and when the body dies, it moves on to some other realm, or finds another body. The second camp believes that the body creates the ‘mind’, perhaps analogously to the way a computer executes instructions in a computer program, or the way a flautist plays a melody. The mind — the ‘inner world’ — is generated by the brain and will come to an end when the brain stops working, just as a melody stops when the flautist puts down the instrument.

In ‘The Wakeful World’, Emma Restall Orr tackles this paradox, and (1) shows that both the solutions above are lacking in serious ways, (2) points out a third solution — indeed, a multitude of other solutions, which have been suggested at one time or another over the past few thousand years, and (3) offers her own take on the problem. In this article I’m mainly going to skip over (1) and (2), since there’s no way I could do Orr’s treatment justice, and instead briefly (and necessarily crudely) describe some aspects of (3) and look at some things that follow from it. In particular, Orr’s take not only leads to the idea that rocks think, but answers why human brains think differently from rocks, and gives a new view of the place of the human experience in the ecology of mind.

Inspired World

So what is Orr’s take? There’s no way to describe it briefly and do it justice, but for the purposes of this article, part of Orr’s view can be summarized in this nutshell:

There’s not just one kind of consciousness. There’s normal waking consciousness, the run-of-the-mill I-think-therefore-I-am consciousness, but there’s also dreaming consciousness, woolgathering consciousness, drunken stupor consciousness, and so on. There’s consciousness when you’re so absorbed in a movie or a task that you’re not self-aware at all, at least in the literal sense of ‘being aware of the self’. And there’s perceptive consciousness, which is simply perception, without any differentiation of perceiver and percept. It’s all mind.

There is no mind-body split. It’s not that mind is some kind of ghost or spirit that inhabits dead matter. Mind is a property of the world, just as naturally and inevitably as wetness is a property of water. Mind is world, and every part of the world is minded, in some way or another. Naturally, different parts of the world have different kinds of consciousness at different times, but it is always and everywhere there. There is something it is like to be an electron.

One concept she uses in particular is the “lit mind”: “The self which is wide awake to the experience of the moment, consciously aware of the sensation of being, thinking about and considering the data of its world, this is the lit conscious, the lit mind.” It’s a useful concept, because it immediately implies the “unlit” or “dark” mind — dark in the sense that, while it is real, it is imperceptible to the lit mind. The dark mind is where dream images arise and unbidden urges take root, but it is also the source of inspiration, intuition, and empathy. “The mind,” she says, “is a vast and ancient wood, the density of its canopy allowing sunlight only now and then to reach through and touch the spiders and mushrooms in the leaf mould of the forest floor. This is who we are… From the fleeting moments of the lit mind where conscious awareness allows the thinking self to consider its context of being, a moment’s light softly fades into the shadows. Yet even as these shadows thicken with a growing darkness, this is still the mind.”

The image is compelling — a strong metaphor, and a much better approximation of reality than the crude mind vs. body paradox. Mind is not all light, and body is not all dark; there is brightness, and darkness, and shades of grey, but it is all nevertheless the same wood.

But a strong metaphor is not a theory. Even a philosophical treatise is not a theory, or even a theorem. To move from metaphor towards concreteness, questions have to be answered. For example, why is so much of mind ‘dark’? Why is the lit part so narrow and focused? What creates the light, and what sustains it, and what causes it to fade away? And what determines where the light falls? Does a rock have a lit mind? And if not, why not?

Our Hive Minds

Neuroscientists are starting to see how the structure of the brain gives rise to properties of the mind. Things that seem to be going on in just our own inner world can be explained by looking at how the axons and dendrites in our physical brains act. This is an essential point, so let me give an example.

Experiments have shown that if an article on a web site ends with the word “Goodbye!”, people are (slightly) more likely to buy something from the web site. The effect disappears if the word is replaced with “See you!”, “So long!” or “Farewell!” Why? Before you answer, consider this apparently unrelated fact: experiments have also shown that people take (slightly) longer to understand written or spoken utterances if they contain a large number of homophones (i.e. words that sound the same). This difference is on the order of milliseconds, but happens even if people are not conscious of the homophone as they read or listen.

The reason for both of these strange effects is that the brain is a network of massively interconnected and interlocking neurons, and various sub-groups of these neurons are trained to work together to solve particular tasks. When the brain takes a word in through sound or vision, all these different groups start working in parallel to interpret it. There is a small group of neurons that knows about the word “bye”, and another network that knows about the word “buy”. When those sounds are heard, both groups of neurons fire, and send signals to the rest of the linguistic neurons about their interpretation. It’s up to the rest of the system — the neurons that know about syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the context — to decide which word is right, and ignore the other. This happens so quickly that you don’t even realize that both homophones were, briefly, both under consideration. But it does slow you down enough for experimenters to detect the difference.

And when you see the word “Goodbye!”, even though it’s quite clearly not at all related to the word “buy”, the neurons in your head associated with “buy” nevertheless get excited, because that’s all they know about. And because those neurons fire, everything else in your brain associated with buying things is also slightly more active. And that means, on average, you’re slightly more inclined to actually buy something from the web site.

It’s quite literally like a hive of bees. When bees are looking for a new place to build a hive, they send out explorers to check out various locations, and when they return, they do a special dance to communicate about the location to the rest of the hive (where it is, what it’s like, how strongly the bee feels about it, etc.). Spectator bees begin to dance along with whichever explorer bee they agree with. Eventually the whole hive is dancing; but a bee may change the way it’s dancing depending on how many other bees around it are dancing the same way. Gradually, through a roughly democratic process, they all find themselves dancing the same dance. And a new hive location is chosen.

The mind, in other words, is not a single monolithic black box that has one thought at a time. It’s a thick underbrush of competing thoughts, only some of which make it into the ‘lit mind’. And this thick underbrush of competing patterns is well-described by the interconnected structure of the brain’s neurons.

Digging In the Undergrowth

Let’s take a moment to look more closely at this structure. Each neuron has many strands (dendrites) allowing them to receive signals from other neurons. But it has just one output strand, the axon; and while that axon may be linked to many other neurons, the neuron sends exactly one signal at a time, to all of them at once. A neuron is dormant until it receives a strong enough signal through its input strands, at which point it fires.

People like to wax poetic about the incredible complexity of the brain, but as is evident, the most basic structures can be laid out in a paragraph or so. A rock about the same size of the brain has a much more complex and intricate structure than the neurons of a brain. A three-pound human brain has about one hundred billion neurons; a three-pound rock has about five hundred trillion trillion atoms, and each atom is part of a molecule which may have any number of connections to other molecules. Molecules aren’t connected by strands, but they do touch each other, and they send ‘signals’ in the form of chemical exchange, electrical current, and even (very slightly) gravitational attraction. They may be strictly laid out in rows, as in crystals, or allowed to come together however they like, as in igneous rock.

Now of course it’s true that I’m not making a strictly fair comparison when I equate neurons and dendrites with molecules and electrical current. Brains are also made of molecules, and to a first approximation, a three-pound brain has about the same number of atoms as a three-pound rock. And I’m not saying that the non-neural parts of the brain — the white matter and so on — isn’t minded, just as a rock is minded. But the neurons of a brain make up a network in their own right, and it’s that simpler network that I’m interested in, because it’s that which gives rise to the lit mind.

Why You Don’t Have Rocks For Brains

So if rocks are actually more complex than brains, why do we have brains in our skulls instead of rocks? Why are brains associated with the lit mind? Why is your brain “smarter” than a rock?

There are three crucial properties that rocks lack:

The very simplicity of neural structure is essential. Simplicity allows focus, as I’ll show in a moment.

Brains are protected, almost completely surrounded on all sides by a hard skull and layers of cushions and fat that keeps out sound, shocks, electrical influences, etc. The inputs that brains do receive are very limited and constrained: a stream of photons from the eyes, acoustic signals from the ears, smell, taste, touch… A rock, on the other hand, is exposed on all surfaces equally.

Neural nets are also malleable, but not overly so. It is more malleable than a rock, because if it receives input, it can more easily adjust its internal structure in response. It’s less malleable than a pool of water, which changes its internal structure dramatically at the slightest touch.

Taking these three properties together, it makes sense that a brain would give rise to a tightly focused consciousness. The malleability of the internal structure means that it responds and changes well to its input, learning how to filter and sift the input so as to home in quickly on the thoughts and decisions that give it the best results. The simplicity of the network makes it speedily trained, and it learns a smaller number of categories, filtering out everything it deems irrelevant. Similarly, if a network receives little input, it will naturally have not much else to think about, and its focus will be tight.

This is not quite the same as Kant’s notion of finitude — the idea that we are continually swamped in a sea of sensory input, and the mind filters most of it out, discarding it as irrelevant to our daily lives. We know, for example, that there is air in the room, but it’s not something our conscious minds think about every moment. That’s true, but it’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m saying that, as vast as the sea of sensory input is, it’s miniscule compared to the sensory input available to a rock. Our brains sit in the dark, except for tiny threads of photons coming in through the eye’s pupils; and in silence, except for the trickle of electrical current from the vibrations of the inner ear; and in constant warmth, except for the signals coming from the skin up through the brain stem. But the rock’s whole surface is exposed to all the elements.

In other words, brains are minded in a lit way because they’re protected from most of the information out there in the world; and what they do get, they rigorously filter so that they can ignore irrelevant details and focus on what’s important (to them). It’s helpful to think of the brain, not as a device for discovery, invention, or logical thought, but for deciding what’s noise, and filtering it out. In much the same way that a black and white photo allows you to see more details, shapes, and textures than a color one, filtering out irrelevant information allows the brain to ‘see’ the remainder more clearly.

And this means that a brain with even more tightly constrained inputs, simpler structure, and more malleability will have a tighter focus, a more brightly lit mind, than a human brain. This doesn’t mean the more brightly lit mind will be “smarter” than a human brain (whatever “smarter” means); it means it will be more efficient at finding the minimum correct patterns and categories for its organism to successfully navigate the world. An ant has a very focused mind — perfectly focused for navigating an ant’s world, too focused for navigating a human world. And a human brain navigating an ant’s world would quickly be unable to stop its attention from wandering, grow bored, lose track of its tasks, etc. Each mind is lit appropriately at a level set by evolution.

This lit mind — this focus — is delicate, though, and can be easily lost; and if that happens, the lit mind begins to shade into the dark.

If the brain gets too much input too fast — especially input that isn’t easily classified according to the brain’s belief system — it can find itself overwhelmed and unable to make sense of its surroundings. This leads to a loss of focus, a transition into a ‘dimmer’ consciousness.

If the brain gets two (or more) different kinds of input — say, from being raised by an ultra-liberal mother and an ultra-conservative father — it can find itself with a sort of double vision, maintaining two schemas, and perhaps maintaining multiple contradictory self-models. Recent research on people who grew up bilingual suggests that the two languages are actually associated with two different sub-personalities, with slightly different preferences, prejudices, and so on. It’s been shown that these folks’ brains end up being more malleable, though it can take longer for them to learn certain things, especially at a young age. The brain can operate with multiple contradictory worldviews, but it can lead to a performance degradation.

If the brain’s ideas and worldviews are never tested against reality, or are only tested against the same facts again and again, it can find itself unable to distinguish important patterns from unimportant ones, and suffer a loss of focus.

And more obviously, if the brain is subjected to chemicals (or a chemical imbalance or lack), no sleep, etc.

If any of these things happen, it means the brain starts acting less like a brain and more like a rock — letting in too much of the world, unable to categorize it or filter it. Without sufficient focus, the brain relaxes into other conscious states.

Speaking With Stone

How, then, would we make a rock act like a brain? Would it even be possible? Absolutely: reconfigure the stone so that it has limited potential connections, limited inputs and outputs, and so on. When we do this, we call it a ‘computer’. Again, this is not ‘improving’ rocks, or giving them mind; they are already minded. We are constraining, focusing their minds. So far our computer-brains have connections and inputs that are much more limited than a human brain, so that even though computers are more malleable than human brains, their consciousness is much more tightly focused. Today’s computers’ minds are lit at a level somewhere between a bee and a beehive.

In this way Orr’s work leads us to a very different conception of mind: one in which humans are no longer at the top of a great chain of mental being, no longer kings of cognition, but simply possessed of a brain that is very well adapted to our needs — not too constrained, not too free, not too malleable, nor too rigid, for our ecological niche and social natures. Just as Copernicus dislodged humanity from the physical center of the universe, this reading of Orr dislodges us from our psychic pinnacle. Instead we’re part of an ecology of mind, one in which the tiny brightly lit mind of the beetle is as valuable and miraculous as the vast dark mind of Mt. Ranier.

As Orr says: “When the actuality of every glint of nature’s mind becomes evident — in the rain and in the air we breathe, in the wet leaves and the photons, in the planet — our values change. When every rustle of perception, every murmur of response, becomes tangible, visceral, it inspires and vitalizes the substance of our reality. When we know the world around us to be crafted of memory, it compels us to refine our response-ability, to become more actively involved in nature’s ongoing creativity.”

Good bye!

This post is part of the Animist Blog Carnival for May 2014, hosted by Alison Leigh Lilly. My deepest thanks to Alison for inspiring many of the ideas in this post, and her valuable feedback on it.

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https://druidjournal.net/2014/05/01/the-mind-of-a-rock-musings-on-orrs-wakeful-world/feed/2fireflyjellyfutureneopaganismiichildishpaganismwheredoideascomefromBig Data Will Blind Youhttps://druidjournal.net/2013/10/08/big-data-will-blind-you/
https://druidjournal.net/2013/10/08/big-data-will-blind-you/#respondWed, 09 Oct 2013 00:36:08 +0000http://druidjournal.net/?p=8301Not all of us are scientists, but all of us today are consumers of science. And I mean science, not technology. When we want to lose weight, or make more money, or find that perfect someone, we don’t go to gurus, and we don’t go with our guts. We look at the latest studies.

It’s been said that Generation X has a deep need for data. Certainly a lot of people my age long ago lost our last vestiges of idealism, and are most interested in knowing, as pragmatically as possible, exactly what works and what doesn’t. We no longer believe in Dr. Spock’s intuitions or Oprah’s platitudes. We want to see what science says. We’re only interested in practical, proven methods. We haven’t given up trying to explain the world, but we’ve stopped trying to make beautiful, abstract theories workable. In the same vein, companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook are proud to call themselves ‘data-driven’: they make no claim to being led by ‘visionaries’, but act based on rigorous analysis of consumer activity. (Of course, there are a minority of companies, such as Apple, which do claim to be led by visionaries, but these are the exception, and their stock prices are more volatile.)

Part of this zeitgeist is the modern tech industry excitement about the possibilities of ‘Big Data’, a rapidly-emerging state in which we’ll have so much data on so many people and so many financial transactions that we’ll cross some kind of singularity into perfect knowledge, a threshold beyond which we’ll find new markets, new products, and vast new vistas of profit.

Maybe so. But there’s a big pitfall that comes with Big Data. If you’re given a big pile of facts, you start to imagine that you know more than you did before; that you can just crunch some equations and run some statistics, and the numbers will tell you what to do. You’re tempted to believe that you don’t need to get the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of things, as long as you have enough ‘what’.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But knowledge without understanding is even more dangerous. Here’s some examples of why.

Object Lesson: Ejectives and Altitude

It was recently discovered that languages spoken at high alititudes are more likely to have ejectives (a type of consonant which is spoken with a certain forcefulness of air pressure). This isn’t a hard and fast correlation, but it’s strongly statistically significant. Why should this be?

The author of the paper, an anthropologist at the University of Miami, suggests that it’s because of the thin air at high altitudes. It’s claimed that ejective consonants are easier to hear in low pressure areas, and the closure of the glottis during pronunciation assists the speaker in remaining hydrated.

Are you suspicious of this conclusion? You should be. The author has noticed a strong correlation, and taken a record-breaking high-flying leap to a conclusion. He has not gone out and tested hydration levels of various speakers of these languages, nor checked out how well ejectives can be heard versus other sounds.

In fact, ejectives are slightly easier to hear than non-ejectives, but they’re not the easiest consonants to hear. By far the most audible consonants to hear are sibilants, like ‘s’. (You can’t whisper an ‘s’.) Why don’t these languages have more sibilants? As for preventing dehydration, you lose most moisture when you’re pronouncing vowels, and your mouth is wide open; so you’d expect fewer vowels, not more ejectives. After all, when you speak, vowels make up about 80-90% of the length of a word.

Nor has he checked to see if there are other correlations of linguistic features with altitude. Turns out there are! High-altitude languages also tend to have objects before verbs in their sentences, and there is also a relationship between the order of verbs and objects and the order of nouns and adjectives. What are we to make of this, then? Does high altitude encourage some kinds of syntax, perhaps because of its effect on brain oxygenation? Perhaps air-starved brains are more likely to push their verbs to the ends of sentences. Or maybe the speakers of these languages rush to get the all-important predicate nouns out of their mouths before they run out of breath.

So… Many… Correlations…

That’s nonsense, of course. But in this situation, and many others, people are inclined to think that correlation must equal causation. For example, recently researchers at UPenn found (among many other fascinating things) that people who talk about sports on facebook are less likely to be neurotic. The researchers then go on to speculate that maybe playing sports helps with depression, or something like that. Well, certainly other (more careful) scientists have shown that physical activity helps with depression. But I notice that the methodology of the UPenn study makes no distinction between playing sports and watching sports. Personally, given the choice between neuroticism and watching football, I’ll take my chances with the neuroticism. Better the devil you know… But again, correlation does NOT mean causation.

So if there’s no causation involved — if high altitude doesn’t necessarily cause ejectives, and watching sports doesn’t necessarily make you happy — what’s really going on? What’s causing the correlation? Well, as far as the ejectives go, Mark Liberman at language log points out that there are hundreds of linguistic features, and thousands of languages; and in a data-rich environment like that, just by chance, there’s bound to be some correlations that don’t have any causal link at all. To understand this intuitively, suppose there are a dozen children on a playground, of which six are girls, and all the girls are in the sandbox. In this case, you might be justified in thinking that boys are avoiding the sandbox for some reason. But if instead there are a hundred children, of which three are wearing black shoes, and two of those are in the sandbox, there’s less likely a causative relationship between black shoes and sandboxes. Come back in ten minutes and maybe just the three kids in red shirts will be in the sandbox. There’s just too many variations of clothing, and too large a sample set, to draw any conclusions.

Another example was one I discussed in my Toxic Society post. Crime rates in the United States have been dropping precipitously, and up till recently no one really knew why. In the past, drops in crime have been associated with good economic times and higher rates of incarceration, so it’s been assumed that poor economies and empty prisons leads to more crime. But as the US economy has struggled through the Great Recession, crime rates have continued to plummet — not just here, but all over the world, regardless of incarceration rate. Another apparent correlation / causation link is broken.

So data can fool you into thinking you know more than you do. Even worse, you can use it to bolster ideas you’re already inclined to believe. But even worse than either of these: data can keep you from digging further to find the real causes of what’s going on.

Assume You’re Blinded

It turns out that the drop in crime rates comes not from the economy or the police work, but from environmental regulation 20 years earlier. These regulations lowered the incidence of lead in children’s brains, making them better at impulse control when they got old enough to be tempted to commit crimes. This would never have been discovered if economist Rick Nevin hadn’t followed a hunch that something was wrong with the conventional ‘data-driven’ wisdom, and undertaken a massive project to uncover the truth. He didn’t find this by looking at huge amounts of data, but by going back and questioning his assumptions.

Let’s look back at the high-altitude ejectives, and try to peel off our cultural blinders. Ejectives are found in about 15% of the world’s languages, but it so happens that none of those languages are English, Spanish, Arabic, or any other widespread language of a culture that is or was an imperialist or colonialist power. Imperialist powers tend to take over lowland areas, since they’re easily accessible from water (i.e. easier to reach with your gunboats), and generally support larger populations, are richer agriculturally, and so on. Therefore, one would expect to find languages with ejectives located in high elevations, deserts, and other relatively resource-poor and inaccessible areas.

If I’m right, then you could pick just about any linguistic feature that appears with relatively low frequency (such as object-first sentential structure, or ergative constructions) and find exactly the same geographic distribution. Object-first structure, for example, is found almost exclusively in the foothills of the Andes mountains, deep in the Amazon rainforest. Ergative languages are found in the Basque country (mountainous), the Caucasus mountains, southwestern Iran (mountainous), the mountainous Pacific Northwest, mountainous Central America and the northern Andes mountains, the largely mountainous Arctic, the mixed desert-and-mountains of the Australian outback, and Tibet. (Note that, ironically enough, there are no ejective languages in Tibet; it’s the largest exception to the ejective/elevation correlation.)

I think it would be very hard indeed to make a convincing case that sentential structure or ergativity is ’caused’ by geographic features like elevation. Of course, no doubt somebody could come up with something plausible, because cultural biases are extremely strong.

All that said: I do think geography has an effect on linguistic sounds, but very indirectly, in more subtle ways. I think generally the path leads through culture. Geography has all kinds of effects on culture, and culture has effects on language. For example, English has (for the most part) a simpler set of consonant sounds and clusters than other Germanic languages, and it definitely has a much simpler syntax and morphology. This is because England was, for over a thousand years, subject to waves of invasions by people speaking various dialects of Germanic, and what you ended up with was sort of the simplest common denominator of them all. And England was subject to these invasions because it was an easily-accessible, poorly-defended island, wealthy in land and natural resources like lumber and tin.

(Even more subtly, I think the spiritual nature of the land has an effect on the spiritual nature of the language. But this is something I feel — I don’t really have any data, big or otherwise, to back that up…)

Seeing Past the Data

So why didn’t the anthropology professor, the linguists, or the statisticians see the link between ejectives and our imperialist history? Because they were blinded by their own cultural assumptions. They simply assumed that linguistic features were scattered randomly among the languages of the world. They didn’t stop to remember that the world’s languages were part of cultures — cultures influenced by hundreds of years of imperialism, of which they are the beneficiaries. I’m not accusing anyone of prejudice. But as George Orwell said, to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

Nevin arrived at the connection between crime and lead not by looking at data, but by questioning basic economic assumptions (that environmental regulation has nothing to do with crime). I came to the connection between ejectives and imperialism by questioning common cultural assumptions. These assumptions are easy to fall into if you don’t know your history. And Big Data isn’t going to save you from that. It’ll be just another tooth on the old saw: lies, damned lies, statistics… and Big Data.

The bottom line is that, as essential as data is, it does not answer any question by itself. Whether in linguistics, business, science, or our own lives, the raw data of our experience has to be analyzed for patterns; and we’ll never see those patterns unless we have unblinkered our eyes.

]]>https://druidjournal.net/2013/10/08/big-data-will-blind-you/feed/0fireflyjellyZemanta Related Posts ThumbnailZemanta Related Posts ThumbnailIntegrating Work and Spirithttps://druidjournal.net/2013/08/22/integrating-work-and-spirit/
https://druidjournal.net/2013/08/22/integrating-work-and-spirit/#commentsThu, 22 Aug 2013 23:09:09 +0000http://druidjournal.net/?p=7073For many years, I kept my spiritual life (Druidry) separated from my work (computational linguistics). Of course, there are certainly strong overlaps — you only have to look at the 50+ articles under ‘Word and Spirit’ in the sidebar to see that. And every once in awhile I’d cast a spell for prosperity or something similar. And the people at work sometimes good-naturedly joke about how Druids dance naked around Stonehenge. Ha ha! Never heard that one before. But for the most part my professional life has been secular, and my religious life non-professional.

I think most people create this kind of separation, and it’s probably not healthy for us. It wasn’t really ever my intent to make this break; and it was my hope, years ago when I started practicing druidry, that they’d come together somehow, sometime. But I didn’t know how that might happen.

Then I got a wake-up call at work: I wasn’t doing so great. My job performance had been disappointing. I needed to step up my game. And if I continued on my course, I’d be in real danger of… well, the consequences remained unspoken, but that of course made the imaginings all the more dreadful.

Reeling From the Shock

What did I do wrong? Well, it wasn’t what I’d done, it was what I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t being proactive enough. I wasn’t being visible enough. I wasn’t taking enough ownership of the projects I was on; I was allowing other people to set the agenda. And furthermore, I needed to take more initiative in the development of my own skills and abilities, particularly in areas of machine learning I was less familiar with.

I’ll be frank: this completely freaked me out for a couple of days. I came home and unloaded everything on my long-suffering wife (who, as always, was a wonderful combination of supportive therapist, priestess, and sounding board). My thoughts ran all over the place; my feelings were chaotic and unpredictable. Sometimes I was sure everything was going to be fine. Other times I gloomily reflected on possible career changes. One day I couldn’t focus on anything, and the next I raced through my work with burning intensity. I even had some trouble sleeping. (Not much, though. I’m a very good sleeper.)

But after a few days the patterns of thoughts and feelings began to repeat. I began to see how certain feelings led to certain thoughts, and those thoughts in turn to other feelings, and round and round. And once I’d recognized my pattern, I could take a step back from it, and say, “Oh yeah, that again.” I was, in a manner of speaking, able to stick a label on it and incorporate it into my self-model.

I began to realize that my thoughts and feelings were converging on a few essential questions. What were my real goals? Was I approaching them the right way? I’d been getting a lot of work done, but was it the right work?

It seemed like I was leaving a lot of important stuff undone.

What Do You Really Want?

I sat down and tried to refocus on my essential goals. It was important for me to first separate the company’s goals from my own goals. If those goals converged, great; if not, then I’d have to do some very serious thinking indeed.

I started brainstorming. I wanted to do well at work, obviously, but more specifically there were particular puzzles I wanted to solve, particular techniques I wanted to explore… Amazon was (and is) doing some really remarkable things in speech-to-text technology, and there was a lot of opportunity to break entirely new ground. But at the moment we were laboring under huge deadlines, and not enough of a workforce — it was hard to set aside time for the most interesting work. Aside from that, I still wanted to write fiction. I’d always wanted to; and I couldn’t just set it aside forever — it always called me back. But it seemed as though I never had time for that, either. And of course I was committed to my wife and my children — they needed me and I wasn’t going to let them down. But my children were on the other side of the country; I knew they were going through a rough time, and there wasn’t much I could do for them on a day to day basis. I also worried that, with my work schedule, I wasn’t there for my wife as often as I should have been. And finally, I was turning 40 soon, and I was conscious that I hadn’t been taking as good care of myself as I should have.

It added up to a big pile of worry.

Now hold on, I said to myself. I live in a gorgeous city. I have a beautiful, amazing, supportive wife. I’m incredibly fortunate to have this fantastic job. And I have some talent for what I do. So why am I under all this pressure? Yes, I want to be able to help people. Can we possibly do all this in such a way that I’m not always feeling inadequate? Why am I always dashing around?

And I think: why can’t I have it all? and then I think: why do I think I deserve to have it all?…

Back into the circular thinking and worrying again.

Ultimately, I decided, it came down to this: I needed to do, to the best of my ability, what the gods asked me to do. It’s not that I’m a slave to the gods, but they often do know better than I do who I really am, and what my goals should be. And how best to achieve them.

Part of deciding what you want is performing discernment. I turned to my most trusted tools: meditation and the Tarot.

Listening to Spirit

I boiled down what I wanted to three things: career, health, and family. The cards came back Queen of Pentacles, High Priestess, and King of Cups. All positive cards — that was a relief!

Queen of Pentacles for career: this is very much worldly success, in a very pleasant way. A lot of the books talk about career women, but also about striking a good work / home balance and so on. I realized that this was talking about organizing my time so that everything I want to do — everything — really does get done. I’d been falling behind both at work and with my writing, so it felt impossible to do both. But the card suggested that anything was possible.

The High Priestess, for me, generally means that I have the power within, if I can just discover and use it. And this was quite obviously so, when it came to my health (and my time and sanity). Really, almost no one was making real, immediate demands on my time or on what I put in my mouth. It’s just that I was… not exactly lazy, but somehow it’s just been hard to balance all the factors (boredom, tiredness, hunger, nutrition, exercise, etc.) to end up with a net loss of weight and gain of muscle, rest, and overall health. The card suggested that the answer was hidden, but available.

The King of Cups, for my family situation, was a great comfort. Basically it indicated I’d continue to be able to provide for the people I loved. I was happy to go with that.

Bringing Spirit to the Work

Somewhat reassured, I began making lists — lists of things I really wanted to achieve professionally. And not vague things, specific things. Unfortunately I can’t share that list publicly, or Amazon would have my hide; but when I wrote it out it lit a fire under me.

And this is where the overlap between Druidry and my professional work began to come into clearer focus for me. I have the chance to work on things that strike at the heart of how thought and language are organized; and as any Druid — or mystic of any spiritual stripe — will tell you, language is sacred.

Odin hung from the World Tree, a sacrifice of himself to himself, to discover the runes, the holy alphabet that simultaneously encodes human language and the symbols of spirit. Odin is my mentor in this. I’m not just trying to teach a machine to understand speech; I’m trying to uncover a representation of language and meaning that’s even more basic than letters — a representation which can be translated into the building blocks of machine code.

Meanwhile, on a more mundane level, Amazon had set its own priorities for me. My boss agreed that I needed to do more machine learning, but that I also needed to work harder on improvements to our lexical resources and tokenization. And in general, I should be more proactive and more visible.

Fortunately our goals — mine and Amazon’s — overlapped a lot. And for most of these goals, I knew what I needed to do to get going.

Managing Management

But what about “being more proactive and visible”? For me, this was way too vague. I didn’t even know where to begin.

So, almost on a whim, I stuck that phrase — “being more proactive” — in Google, just to see what came out. And guess what? There are thousands of articles about that. I started reading… Article after article, for the better part of an hour. It gave me lots of things to think about. When I stumbled on something that resonated with me, I wrote it down. After a day or two of thinking and allowing my subconscious to ruminate, parts of these pits and pieces began to congeal into an an action plan — something concrete that I could actually believe in.

First, to be more visible: in email and in meetings, always contribute your point of view. Try to be less afraid of making a fool of yourself. Even if it’s just to explain why you agree with someone else. Occasionally, send out a mass email about your concerns.

Second, focus on learning more. The more you learn, the more you can contribute. And the more you can contribute, the better you’ll be known and liked.

The most interesting exercises for boosting self-confidence were here and here. As for being proactive, I decided to develop a meditative practice to encourage it, based on this article.

While reading and thinking about ‘being proactive’ and ‘taking ownership’, it finally struck me how passive I’d been in my career thus far. For whatever reason — probably just my personality — I’d been largely content to allow other people to set my agenda and judge my progress. After all, I never had a big-picture view of the company, the department, or its goals; how was I to know how to set priorities?

But it’s become clearer to me over time that no one has a true big-picture view. This isn’t a jab at Amazon, or any other company I’ve worked for; it’s just a fact about any large organization (i.e., one with more than, say, a thousand people). Any one person, in management or out of it, only has a small piece of the information they need, and so they rely on others to be experts. And they need their experts to not just answer questions and give advice, but to anticipate problems and fix them ahead of time. Managers, in other words, shouldn’t tell you what to do; they don’t know what you should do. They should provide goals and resources and get out of the way.

I realized I shouldn’t be asking for permission. I should be saying, “Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s how long it will take. And here’s how it’ll help.”

Plan vs. Action

This whole process took a week or two — orienting myself, figuring out a new plan, and getting started. It wasn’t pleasant.

But then I was in motion, and I had some inertia. I felt much more in control of what was going on. I began to see opportunities to step up and get things done, making myself more helpful and more visible. I made a lot of progress very quickly, and started to get excellent feedback.

Oddly enough — and perhaps it’s surprising to read this — ultimately, I didn’t stick to my plan at all. After I read all that advice about productivity and proactivity, and made plans to do exercises and meditations and so on… I honestly never did any of it. A plan, after all, isn’t really about the future; it’s about getting yourself in motion now. A specific, rock-solid plan is only useful when you’re standing still. When you’re actually moving, plans have to become fluid immediately; you must hold them loosely and reexamine them often. As it turned out, for me personally, the exercises and meditations would have been a distraction from actually doing the work.

Integrity and Death

When Odin hung himself from the World Tree, part of him died. If it had not, it wouldn’t have been a sacrifice. But as death is a part of nature, it is also part of the soul; it is how the soul changes. A life cannot be constant growth, with no pruning, no pause. Eternal growth is cancer, not life.

In a very small way, when I was given a poor performance review, I was told that part of me had to die. It was no wonder that I went through stages of denial, panic, bargaining, and so on. It was difficult. Fortunately, I had help — from my wife, my guides, and my gods. And by pulling together parts of myself that I’d been holding separate — by integrating them, and thereby, in a very real sense, increasing my integrity — I rallied myself and created the seeds of a new whole.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely. –the Buddha

Of course, once I had myself going properly, I quickly reached such a frenzied pace that I began to burn out. Fortunately my wife and I were able to take a weekend retreat for some deep meditation and soul work based on a fantastic book called Personal Mythology, which was incredibly helpful. I’ll be writing about that next.

]]>https://druidjournal.net/2013/08/22/integrating-work-and-spirit/feed/6fireflyjellyinterviewfrankmaceowenwheredoideascomefromabysswethepeoplebecomedeathA Prayer for the New Yearhttps://druidjournal.net/2013/01/04/a-prayer-for-the-new-year/
https://druidjournal.net/2013/01/04/a-prayer-for-the-new-year/#commentsFri, 04 Jan 2013 05:00:26 +0000http://druidjournal.net/?p=4958“To pray for particular favors is to dictate to Divine Wisdom, and savors of presumption; and to intercede for other individuals or for nations, is to presume that their happiness depends upon our choice, and that the prosperity of communities hangs upon our interest.” – William Paley

I’ve been thinking a bit about prayer recently. It’s always confused me, frankly. What is it for?

Let me explain. Suppose you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient God; and suppose you want something from this God — say, a new car, or (if you’re less materialistic) strength, or a sign, or serenity, or more time, or even just general blessings. But isn’t it the case that God already knows what you want? And if he knows what you want, and you still don’t have it, doesn’t that mean God probably doesn’t want you to have it? In other words: why do you think praying will change God’s mind?

Or suppose you want deliverance from something — from stress, from unemployment, from a disease, whatever it is. Again: why do you think praying will change God’s mind?

Or maybe you’re not praying for yourself, but for a friend, a relative, a stranger. Suppose someone you love is terribly sick, and you pray to God that He will save them. But God is all-powerful, isn’t He? Isn’t He the cause of the disease, really? Couldn’t He have already cured them, if He wanted? If God has decided someone should suffer, why should He care what you think? Aren’t you really saying, “Please, God! Don’t hurt my loved one any more!”? And doesn’t that imply that God is less merciful and forgiving than you are?…

I’m not saying God is evil (although the problem of why evil exists is very serious). I’m just saying that I doubt prayer works like that. God, omnipotent or not, existent or not, isn’t Santa Claus. If He’s all-knowing and all-powerful, then He already knows what you want, He’s already got the universe set up the way He wants it, and your prayers can’t change anything. (Statistical studies bear this out, by and large.)

What Prayer is Really For

The word pray has a pretty straightforward origin. It comes from Proto Indo European prek, “ask, request, entreat”, which was the root of the noun prex “prayer, request, entreaty” in Latin, converted back to a verb as precari “ask earnestly, beg”, and then came into French as preiere, and English as prayer. Phonosemantically it carries the sense of broadening, widening, opening, moving out from a point.

As simple as these facts are, though, perhaps they can give us a clue to what prayer is really for — what it’s really doing.

Because prayer isn’t useless. Prayer, of one form or another, is a staple of almost every religious tradition, regardless of how many gods and spirits there are, and regardless of how powerful they are or whether they already know your desires before you pray a word. Prayer is for something. What?

An Invitation

Consider this. If you ask for something, if you entreat or beg, you are displaying your vulnerability; and by doing so, you’re emotionally breaking down barriers between yourself and Spirit. You’re inviting Spirit to reach into your life and intervene — to change your life, to change your circumstances, to change your self.

Perhaps it’s the invitation that’s really what’s important here. After all, if you truly have free will, then no god or spirit can just mess around with your life without your permission. They might mess around with your circumstances — showering you with good luck or misfortune — but they can’t mess around with you. That’s what free will means.

But if you say a prayer — if you ask for intercession — you’re explicitly setting aside your free will (for a while). You’re saying, “You know what? I can’t do this by myself. Could you take the wheel a bit?”

A prayer isn’t so much supplication as it is permission: permission given by you to the Powers that Be to give you a hand, if they would be so kind. And it is understood that you will take control again when you are ready, no questions asked.

A Recognition of Union

In many of the more mystical religious traditions, my own included, there is no sharp line between the self and the spirit. Prayer, in this view, is a way of breaking a barrier that is itself already an illusion, allowing the truth of interconnection to be seen. The breaking of the illusion allows the way to be seen clearly, and allows the suffering to pass. And so the prayer works: the serenity and the strength is granted; the sign is given.

What if you’re praying for someone else, though? You can’t set aside someone else’s free will. A good question! In my view, praying for other people has no effect unless you break down the spiritual and emotional barriers between yourself and them. If you pray from your deepest heart, where you and they are One, then you can effectively give Spirit permission to intercede on their behalf.

Because we really are all one. And we join together both on the edges and in the center. We merge on the edge where our thoughts march in parallel — if we have similar ideas, similar ways of thinking, similar hobbies and interests. And we merge in the center where our hearts beat to the same rhythms, are quickened by the same images and sounds, are moved by the same pities and yearnings. In these places where we are One, we can intercede for each other, and we can speak for each other.

On that note, dear readers, I offer a prayer for us both.

A Prayer for the New Year

May you spread out, so that you may return to the source.
May you be generous, so that you may gain the world.
May you strike a decisive blow, and then stop.
May your victories bring you no pride.
May you overcome your enemies, but not dominate them:
for the strong always weaken with time.

May you know others, so that you may be intelligent;
know yourself, so that you may be truly wise;
know you have enough, so that you may be truly wealthy;
persist, so that you will reach your goal.

May you embrace death, so that you will not perish, but have life everlasting.
May you be soft and pliable, so that you can overcome the hard and inflexible.
May you know the light in the darkness,
know the advance in the retreat,
know the ease in the rough path,
know the fullness in the emptiness,
know the purity in the tarnished,
know the sufficiency of true virtue.

May you taste the purity of the polluted,
feel the softness of the thorns,
see the light of the darkness,
hear the mightiest words of the silence.

May you find the Way in the Unnamed,
and be nourished and fulfilled.

]]>https://druidjournal.net/2013/01/04/a-prayer-for-the-new-year/feed/3Puget_Sound_Discovery_Park_Feb_2012fireflyjellywindy_lake_2Puget_Sound_Discovery_Park_Feb_2012In Which Links are Forged and Pods are Casthttps://druidjournal.net/2012/10/02/in-which-links-are-forged-and-pods-are-cast/
https://druidjournal.net/2012/10/02/in-which-links-are-forged-and-pods-are-cast/#commentsWed, 03 Oct 2012 00:58:47 +0000http://druidjournal.net/?p=4191My attention has been away from this blog for a while, so I thought it might be interesting to collect some links to what I’ve been working on. Over at Faith, Fern, and Compass, for example, I’ve contributed a couple of articles that might be of interest to you:

The Sea in the Skull

Theologians and scientists agree: ritual is good for the human soul. But I don’t like ritual much. It’s probably my Zen upbringing. If ritual is poetry in the realm of acts, then perhaps my poetic-action aesthetic is too used to the haiku or koan: short, unrehearsed, improvised, intentionally subversive. But one thing I do like about ritual is the creation of a sacred space. This is about how I create a sacred space without ritual.

The Land’s Religion: Hold Her In Your Heart

Those of us of European descent who don’t live in Europe — who live, in fact, in landscapes conquered or annexed by our ancestors — do not have a simple relationship with the earth we live on… We are like a branch grafted onto the wrong tree, an organ transplanted into another body. We’re aliens in our own homes. But we cannot go back where we came from; we’d be aliens there, too. There is nowhere in the world that we really belong. So what should our relationship be?

Fun Podcast Episodes

I also want to point you toward some of our recent podcast episodes; we’ve had such a blast making these. (Note that some of these episodes are only available to pro members).

Shrines of the Living Land

In this second part, we explore space, place and sacred paradox by looking at the religious symbolism and themes of Chinese landscape painting. Taoist themes of immortality, wise innocence, active non-action and the harmony of the natural world are expressed in the wild mountainous landscapes of artists through the centuries.

The Nature of Placemaking

We check out the many amazing ways that people all over the world are embracing “green space” through architecture, infrastructure and landscaping, inviting the natural world back into our homes and businesses as a vital part of our efforts to live sustainably. In our Pro Extension, we ponder the implications of granting legal rights to rivers and forests; plus, we examine the “religious” aspect of the debate over hydro-fracking.

Natural Wonders

We explore the infinitely awe-inspiring natural world with a reading of Alison’s article, “The Seven Wonders of the Natural World in Your Own Backyard.” Then I sit down for a fascinating, wide-ranging interview with Brian McLaren, an influential pastor, speaker and author who understands nature’s spiritual dimension and its essential role in the future of Christianity, humanity, and the world. Finally, for our Pro extension, I read Alison’s bedtime story about King Arthur’s search for the mightiest huntsman who ever lived — the Tale of Mabon.

And that’s not even counting the two Spiritual Ecology episodes (One and Two) where we did an in-depth review of Archdruid John Michael Greer’s new book. Good stuff!

Ravelling Skeins

Remember my novel, Mere America? It’s only partly finished, and quite frankly I’ve hit a solid writer’s block on it. (The first part, First Nations is still available for 99 cents as an ebook, and continues to sell reasonably well considering I haven’t promoted it at all! Check it out — I will finish it eventually, and the first part largely stands alone.) I have the next few sections roughly sketched out, and I even wrote about 90% of the second part (“The Withered Hand”), but after thinking about it I realized most of what I’d written would have to be thrown away. I’ve decided to set it aside while I work on other projects for a while.

So what am I working on? Well, I’ve been wanting to write something steampunk for some time; and I’ve had a young-adult sci-fi novel sitting there — finished, but deeply flawed, waiting for its revisions… and there was a bright spark when those ideas came together. I sat down and got to work, and characters and situations just poured out. So…

So yes, I’m working on a young adult steampunk novel! The working title is The Athenium Chronicles, Book I: Leviathan. In which Amy Milton, an orphaned girl with strange powers she cannot control, is abducted to the Athenium: a remote, secret school, where she must succeed — or be driven mad.

Fun for the whole family! (Steampunk often flirts with the edge of horror, and this will be no exception — though honestly my stomach for horror isn’t particularly strong, so I’ll be handling it with a very light, humorous touch.) Over on my writing blog, A Skein of Words, I’ll be posting more about this as I work on it. It’s going to be a blast!

Uncommon Beauty

]]>https://druidjournal.net/2012/10/02/in-which-links-are-forged-and-pods-are-cast/feed/1fireflyjellyView from Cape MaeresStory, History, and Meaninghttps://druidjournal.net/2012/05/11/story-history-and-meaning/
https://druidjournal.net/2012/05/11/story-history-and-meaning/#respondFri, 11 May 2012 22:42:39 +0000http://druidjournal.net/?p=2664In the episode of Faith, Fern and Compass we posted this week, Alison and I talked a bit about stories, and what their purpose might be. Is storytelling something with evolutionary origins? If so, what? And why? It’s a completely open question, but an essential one: stories and histories, real or imagined, provide entertainment, bind communities together, give our lives meaning and provide guidance and comfort in difficult times. As we discuss in the podcast, figuring out how to cultivate storytelling and other types of art — while somehow accommodating the social upheaval they inevitably give rise to — is critical. As Susan Biali says, “We cannot afford to waste human gifts. We need to learn how to nurture the creative nature.”

After the podcast, I went back and looked a little deeper into the etymologies of history and story. There is an unfortunate urban legend that history literally means, and comes from, the words “his story”, and while there is a faint glimmer of truth in that — and of course the deeper, more abstract truth, that what we call “history” is too often the story of what dead white guys were doing — the fact is that history and story have more to do with wizard than anything else. These are all the same word, at root; they ultimately arise from a term meaning one who is wise.

With wizard it’s most obvious: the Proto Indo European weid, meaning “to see” or “to know” descended into Proto Germanic as wisaz and Old English as wis. In Middle English it was combined with the suffix -ard, indicating one who is or does (as in coward, drunkard), and made to mean one who is wise — perhaps even too wise.

But in Greek, this same Proto Indo European root weid became his (“wise”), and was combined with tor (“one who is or does”) to mean, basically, wizard; and the term histor was often used to mean “old man, wise man, judge”. A historia, then, would be a tale told by such a wizard. It was borrowed directly into Latin, and thence into French, becoming estorie.

It was then borrowed twice by English — once to become history, and once to become story. For a long time these two words were just two versions of the same term, like want to and wanna, but eventually story (the less formal version) took on connotations of ficticiousness and frivolity and went its own way.

Spiritually both history and story share connotations of a fertile, abundant path through grounded, earthy territory, rounding up with powerful motion that ends in an expression of fortitude and stamina. The hi- at the beginning of history adds a depth of rootedness, of something arising from a hearth and home. It is this rootedness that gives history its peculiar power to give guidance, bind communities, and infuse our lives with meaning.